“Have you been to Harlech before?”
Garnett shook his head. “No. I’m looking forward to seeing it.”
“I am too. Places that have figured in songs are different somehow. There’s a kind of imminence.” Janice lit a cigarette. “You know, this trip may not help you much. It would have been better to hire a private detective.”
“Never thought of it,” Garnett said in genuine astonishment. “I suppose they really do exist.”
Janice laughed. “Of course they do! One of my best friends runs a small agency.”
Garnett tried to kill a pang of annoyance. “Interesting work, I suppose.”
“I’m sure it would only take him a matter of hours to find out which of your employees have been to Harlech. That’s the sort of thing he does all the time. Shall I give him a call?”
“Let’s see how I get on first,” Garnett said ungraciously. He had told Janice only enough to give her the impression he was on a commercial security investigation of some kind, and was beginning to wonder whether he had said too little or too much. Debating the point, he drove in silence for a while and it was then, just as he was beginning to relax, that the first cool tendrils of alarm began to reach up from the depths of his nervous system.
Filled with a kind of astonishment, Garnett instinctively slowed the car and the white road markers began arrowing beneath at a more leisurely rate. He was disturbed—his quickened pulse and breathing made that clear—but there was no discernible reason. If I were a Philip Marlowe, he thought, this feeling would be caused by the fact that I had subconsciously noted the too-frequent appearance of a certain car in the rear-view mirror, but I haven’t seen any vehicles at all for some time. Could that in itself be a wrong note? No, roads like this one would be relatively empty in late morning.
Garnett depressed his right foot again and the seat urged against his back as the car responded. Janice gave him a speculative stare through a grey voodoo mask of cigarette smoke. The machine continued its effortless, whispering progress between mountains and sea, but now Garnett could feel his alarm increase with every minute. It grew with each fresh glimpse of soaring rock faces and each new involution of the road until the psychic pressure became almost intolerable … then came a partial answer.
“Janice,” he said thoughtfully. “Do you know much about this déjà vu thing?”
“Nothing. I’ve heard it defined as the opposite of uncanniness.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, uncanniness is a feeling of strangeness in familiar circumstances, déjà vu is a feeling of familiarity in strange circumstances. Have you got that feeling now? Is that what’s the matter with you?”
Garnett nodded uncertainly. “I get the feeling I’ve been here before, and yet … Good God!”
“What is it?” Janice stubbed out her cigarette.
“I have been here before! With Clifford Pryce!”
“Problem solved,” Janice said cheerfully. “Gone the way of all para-normal phenomena.”
Garnett felt no better. The problem had been solved on one level—but how could he have forgotten? During one of his meetings in Liverpool with Pryce, while they were still discussing the terms of Garnett’s engagement, the old millionaire had decided the day was too hot for sitting indoors and insisted on going for a long drive. Garnett, drunk on visions of the new future opening before him, had not paid much attention to anything outside the car, but he should have remembered the exhilarating high-speed run down the Welsh coast. Why, at the turning point they had even lunched in Harlech! Garnett had travelled considerably and at the age of thirty-eight was beginning to realise he could not clearly remember every day of his life. He could, however, remember the high spots and they did not come any higher than the time he had been given the chance to create the T.6—so how could he have forgotten?
They reached Harlech at midday. Garnett stopped the car in the main street and sat for a moment deciding what he ought to do next. The village was a linear scatter of blocks of sunshine, shadow and stone which appeared not to have changed in the last hundred years. Where was he to start? And what was he to say? “Pardon me, is there a local establishment where men are trained to secretly manufacture aircraft components nobody would buy?”
It dawned on Garnett he had been nursing an illogical hope that the mere fact of his being in Harlech would trigger off new events which would lay all the answers out in front of him, but of course it was not going to be like that. This was a fact he had subconsciously understood all along and the sudden conscious realisation led him to his first direct thoughts about the forthcoming evening and night. It seemed too good to be true. He had never before met a girl who might have tempted him to try fitting marriage into his high-paced career, yet with Janice the question of legal entanglements did not arise. She preferred her ‘natural relationships’ and that being the case Garnett was more than happy to go along with her.
Janice patted her black hair into place. “Where are we staying, Tony? I ought to freshen up.”
“Not here. There’s a new motel at Llanbedr, about twenty minutes further down the coast. Shall I drop you there and come back?”
“No, I’ll be all right.” They got out and Garnett noticed she had not changed into flat-heeled shoes to help equalise their heights. He told himself it was because conventions about height, like all other conventions, were unimportant to her, all part of the wonderful grab-bag of goodies he was getting for nothing. After touring the village together they went into the dim coolness of an inn and ate incredibly good sandwiches of home-cured ham, washed down with heavy tankards of ale. She ate and drank with a kind of mannish gusto which he would have found disconcerting had it not fitted in so perfectly with his vision of her as his wayward child of nature, purveyor of guiltless enjoyments.
“You aren’t happy about all this, are you, Tony?”
Garnett looked up from filling his pipe. “I’m happy about us, but I’ve got … problems at the works and I probably ought to be back there doing something about them. You were quite right about the detective agency. I feel slightly lost.”
“Why do you worry so much about your work? From what you’ve told me you’ve spent: your whole life flying aeroplanes, or building them, or having them drop on your head.”
Garnett ruefully stroked the still-bristly hairs under which the stainless steel plate completed his skull. “Perhaps it’s egotism. Some people sell shoes for a living, or write in ledgers—I put those big birds up in the sky. And now they have my name on them, so I want them to be good.”
“So that your name will live on, etcetera.”
“Something like that, yes.” Garnett found himself on the defensive.
“You aren’t an egotist, Tony. You’re a solipsist.” Janice laughed without removing her cigarette, which gave her lips an unexpectedly cruel twist. “Your name won’t live on, you know. Look, you’re going to live for seventy or eighty years if you’re lucky. Supposing you were an all-round genius and you spent that time developing a longevity drug which increased your life span to a thousand years. You aren’t going to do that, but let’s suppose it anyway. Imagine then that you devoted your thousand years to studying science and became absolute master of the physical universe—which you aren’t going to do either. Suppose next that you used your fantastic powers to gather up every star in the galaxy and arrange them to spell out your name in letters a thousand light years high …’